Category Archives: Education Reform

The following post originally appeared on the Brookings Institution’s Chalkboard blog. One of the most talked-about education studies in recent months is a new working paper on the effects of Louisiana’s statewide voucher program during its first year of operation. In short, the authors find that students who won a school voucher via lottery ended up […]

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If you follow me on Twitter you probably know that I’ve been sifting through many years of reports from the California Department of Education and the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to learn about California’s supply of teachers. Since I’ve been generating a number of charts, I thought I’d put them all together in one place. First, for […]

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Last week the Brookings Institution’s Chalkboard blog published a piece of mine on the importance of the teacher supply to education reform. It’s really an elaboration of a point I’ve made at various times in the past, with California as an illustrative example: [M]any teacher evaluation reform efforts may be focused too heavily on the demand […]

This piece originally appeared on the Brookings Institution’s Chalkboard Blog. Many contemporary education reform efforts attempt to leverage teacher evaluation policy to improve teacher quality, by making the evaluation process more rigorous or by tying results more directly to student learning outcomes, for example. By increasing the demand for high-quality teaching and teachers, these reforms […]

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My writing slowed down quite a bit this year, but I still had (just) enough posts on this site to justify producing a ‘top 5’ list: 1. There is Probably No Crisis in American Education. This post was particularly popular among “reform critics”, but my view is that it really cuts both ways in the […]

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Starting in 1999, schools in Quebec implemented an ambitious curricular & instructional program at all schools in the province. Broadly speaking, this program can be considered “constructivist” and the math program in particular seems to have been of the “reform math” variety. To get a sense for what the reformers had in mind, they described wanting students to […]

John Thompson, citing a report from the Carnegie Corporation and doubling down here, claims that the Common Core standards are going to cause the high school dropout rate to double. So, it is doubly important that Carnegie commissioned McKinsey to use the reformers’ data “to test whether or not it might be possible to avoid large drops in […]

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It was a little surprising to see the AFT take a stand against the edTPA teacher licensing test given President Randi Weingarten’s support for similar “bar exams” for teachers, and it got me thinking about “professionalizing” teaching in general. That teaching needs to be “professionalized” is a mostly-platitudinous claim, but you often hear from both sides in […]

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A couple of weeks back at This Week in Education I tried to explain why the Vergara decision in California doesn’t have easily-predictable major consequences, even if you hand-wave away all of the inevitable legal wrangling and assume tenure and seniority rules for teachers do end up changing significantly. Partisans really don’t like thinking – or […]

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Back in early April the American Statistical Association put out a “Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment“. Last month, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff issued a response, in part because so many commentators seemed to misunderstand the ASA statement and in part because the ASA seemed not to have incorporated some […]